Post Game
by Mouse-size-Dragon
Summary: Someone else on the team has noticed something wrong with Niou, or, well, he's Yagyuu now isn't he. Prequels: His Face, After Mask.


**Disclaimer: **I don't own Prince of Tennis, but I watched the French Open thing.

**AN:** Not Betaed; I'm the only one who's edited it so sorry for any mistakes. A continuation of 'His Face,' each part is a mini-story in that universe, this comes third.

**WARNING:** Past character death.

Title: Post Game

Yanagi Renji was the data _Master_. He was the best data tennis player in Japan, he'd pretty much invented the style after all, so he knew each and every one of his teammate's abilities on and off the courts even better than they did. After Niou died Yagyuu continued to play even though the probability of that happening was between forty and fifty percent depending on the circumstances of Niou's death (it went down below thirty if his death was tennis related). Given that Niou had been walking home from tennis practice and he and Yagyuu had just parted ways when a car hit him, there was only a forty-seven percent chance that Yagyuu would continue playing tennis (taking into account his love of the sport and his gentlemanly feelings of responsibility towards the team).

Losing the boy who introduced him to the sport, dogged him until he joined the team and then partnered with him when he did, should have effected Yagyuu profoundly. Now while there was the option that he would focus more ferociously on improving his game and becoming a better player as a sort of tribute to Niou it was far more likely that Yagyuu's game would suffer, at least at first, due to his grief.

He watched his teammate during practice, and school, and he was impossibly unaffected by Niou's death. In the face of the sudden loss of his best friend (thirty-two percent chance they were more than friends) Yagyuu's perfect demeanor should have faltered. Yet he acted perfectly normal, too perfectly. His statistics didn't even twitch; his every action, practice, conversation, everything stayed exactly as it had been before the accident. It wasn't humanly possible to be so unaffected without being a certified sociopath, and while they might have joked that Niou was crazy neither half of that doubles team had been that abnormal. After spending night after night, practice after practice, worrying about and watching his teammate he knew, with ninety-four percent certainty, there was only one plausible reason for Yagyuu's unchanged demeanor.

Yagyuu avoided doubles, he wouldn't even watch others, and only played singles games now. If anyone mentioned Niou he ignored them. They'd been almost inseparable and so close no one could tell them apart when they switched, even he, Yanagi Renji, had never been more than sixty percent sure on his best days which was which, and now Yagyuu couldn't stand to hear his friend's name. But he knew, because he knew almost everything, that Yagyuu had Niou's ashes in his room.

So he tested him, mentioned small bits of Yagyuu's stats to him, commented on how he seemed to be the only member of the regulars whose play was unaffected by their loss, which was true, and watched his reaction. The anger and hidden despair confirmed his suspicions. Yagyuu wasn't as unaffected as he appeared to be, the game that was suffering was the one he didn't show them. And, based on all of the data he'd been gathering since they'd found out that Niou would never come back to practice, the game that was suffering wasn't Yagyuu's. It was Niou's.

Due to their habits of interchanging identities and abilities to flawlessly execute one another's playing styles it was really a fifty-fifty toss-up of who had been who on any given day. Therefore there was an original fifty percent chance that the Niou who was killed was actually Yagyuu pretending to be Niou. Taking into account his unchanged play style and his behavior since then there was a ninety-four percent chance that the Yagyuu who lived was really Niou pretending to be Yagyuu because he thought he couldn't tell the truth.


End file.
